Coffee - every year,
we grind our way through more than 200 million kilos of the stuff.
Together, we get through 55 million cups a day.
Tonight, we are going to reveal the astonishing process
that turns green beans...
..into instant coffee.
Quenching our thirst is clearly a big job.
This enormous factory is almost half a mile across.
I'm Gregg Wallace...
I love this stuff!
..and I'm chilling out,
discovering the secrets of freeze-drying coffee...
It's like part adventurous and part very scary.
..and finding out how they get that freshly brewed aroma...
I recognise that.
..in every cup.
Does seems strange, you have to take the smell out
and put it back in again.
I'm Cherry Healey.
So, this is my brain.
I'm going cold turkey on caffeine...
I'm so sleepy.
It's half-past eight!
..and exploring the future of the coffee plant.
It's not good news, I'm afraid.
In many cases, we've seen arabica dying in Ethiopia.
And historian Ruth Goodman goes back in time...
Eugh, that's foul!
..and lifts the lid on the world's first instant coffee.
It looks rather like axle grease.
Tonight, we spill the beans
on how this factory makes 175,000 jars of instant coffee
every 24 hours.
Cheers!
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Nestle factory in South Derbyshire.
890 people work here,
making instant coffee and coffee pods.
Tonight, we're following the production
of freeze-dried instant coffee.
It all starts with a delivery of coffee beans.
Overseeing this morning's shipment is Robbie Hickinson.
Robbie, thank you very much for showing me around.
It's no problem. So, this is where it all starts, right?
This is green bean reception.
How many beans on that truck?
27 tonnes of arabicas from Brazil.
If that's arabica, how many types are there?
Two - robustas, arabicas, and we have to use both sorts.
One gives it the body, and the other one gives it the fruitiness.
Right now, we've got to unload 27 tonnes of these from South America.
The truck is connected up, and unloading begins.
The countdown from beans to jars starts now.
It'll take two hours for this lot to pour into the factory.
When you say green beans, I think about me dinner.
Can I have a look?
They are not green - they are grey!
Next, you're going to be telling me they're not really beans.
Not really, no. They're not, are they?
No. Not really. HE LAUGHS
It's what we call them.
What they actually are, they're the seed of a coffee cherry.
And guess what - they're not even cherries.
The bright red fruit of the coffee plant looks like a cherry
when it's ripe and ready for harvesting.
Inside each fruit are two seeds.
These are the green coffee beans.
So, how many tonnes will come through here in the course of a day?
Between 75 and 100 tonnes a day, 450 tonnes a week.
That's five deliveries of beans from all over the world
arriving here every day.
27 tonnes of this, unloading.
What exactly are you pouring into?
We have a receiving hopper
that's got a mesh that takes out any big things.
Then they go through a cleaner, where we take out smaller items.
Do you get much debris in there?
We get quite a bit, yeah.
Anything unusual?
We've had iguana, we had a live iguana,
and that ended up at Twycross Zoo.
We've had flip-flops, bullets, knives...
Money. HE LAUGHS
We've had it all - no gold, though!
If you do get another iguana, though, give me a call.
I will do, yeah, definitely.
You can have it!
Well, we've got our main ingredient,
but it's missing that wonderful aroma.
To get that, these beans needs to be roasted.
Cherry has been checking out the chemistry that creates our coffee.
Whether you buy instant, filter or freshly ground,
all coffees are roasted.
Each of these packets gives a roast level, so light, medium or dark.
Then there are city roasts, French roasts and Italian roasts.
I want to understand what the differences are,
so I've come to Bath to meet three-time UK barista champion
Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood for a coffee-roasting masterclass.
Hi, Maxwell!
Hello, Cherry. So, what is this?
What is this contraption? So, this is a siphon,
but I'm going to bring it down now,
and then we can make you a cup of coffee.
To begin with, Maxwell wants me to taste coffee
made from unroasted green beans.
Cheers. Cheers.
To a first.
So, it definitely doesn't have as much flavour or as much punch.
It's more of a flavoured water.
Yeah, it just sort of tastes like grassy water, doesn't it?
So, is this why you roast coffee beans?
Yeah, absolutely. So, then what happens is, when we roast it,
that's when we unlock all of that flavour potential.
Every green coffee bean is packed with natural flavour compounds
that are transformed when they're heated up.
Maxwell's going to roast the same batch of beans to different levels
to show me how their taste and appearance changes.
OK, so... Oh, here we go.
There's the real deal. So, how do we kick this off?
Well, let's do a roast. We put our green coffee in here.
OK. So, let's start it here.
"Roasting start." OK, you can see the...
Oh, there they go!
..the green coffee drops into the drum. Round and round.
As the beans heat up, the green pigment, chlorophyll, turns yellow,
then brown.
Sugars and proteins break down into new flavour compounds.
Vaporising water forces itself out with an audible pop,
known as the first crack.
COFFEE BEANS CRACKLE
I can definitely hear the first crack, they're jumping about,
and the aroma's much more intense.
We would call this a light roast - a city roast, maybe,
if you're in America.
Now for a medium roast - 12 minutes at 210 degrees C,
which brings out more caramel and chocolate flavours.
With the medium roast, we're going to stop it just before second crack.
The final, or second, crack is caused by a build-up of gases.
Here we go!
Looks slightly shinier than the light roast.
Now for the dark roast - 14 minutes at 235 degrees C.
Acidic molecules in the beans turn into compounds called lactones
which taste bitter.
It's really smoky - is it meant to be that smoky?!
Well, unfortunately, there's no way of roasting dark roast coffee
without creating that amount of smoke. Wow, we've made a really,
really dark roast! This would be a French roast.
Is that not burnt?
I would call it burnt,
but there is a market for coffee this dark out there.
It smells bitter and pungent,
but it's still a coffee smell.
I can definitely really see the difference in oil content.
Absolutely, so during that second crack, the build-up of CO2,
it forced all the oils onto the outside of the bean.
Our three roasts look very different.
But how do they taste?
Maxwell brews up a cup of each one.
This is the light roast.
I didn't think I would like the light brew... Mm-hm.
..but the flavour's beautiful, and it's not too bitter or punchy.
Often, there is an association that the light roast coffee
is less flavourful,
but actually the idea behind a really good light roast
is to showcase the character of the coffee.
It should have lots of flavour, even though it's light.
So, let's do the medium roast.
So, I would normally go for a medium to dark.
OK. I always just think more is more.
You see, I like that...
Yeah. ..but it's starting to get...
More bitter? A little bit mouthy.
Yeah. And then the dark roast...
SHE SPLUTTERS
HE LAUGHS
Phew, are my eyes watering?!
It's got a really strong aftertaste, as well.
Yeah. And I normally drink mine with quite a lot of milk.
That's a really good point -
so what you liked about the light roast coffee,
the fats in the milk will wipe a lot of that fruity acidity out.
So, this might be a bit weak with milk.
I never drink black coffee, really, because it tastes so bad on its own.
Yes, sure. Actually, I wonder, if I tried to drink light roast
a bit more, I could have it black.
Well, actually, the crusade of a lot of the speciality coffee shops
is getting people to taste the black coffee for that very reason.
I've never had a light roast coffee before,
and I think that is delicious,
and I would have that without milk.
Excellent. Light roast wins.
Ultimately, which roast you prefer is down to personal taste,
but there's so much variety out there, why not experiment?
Back in Derbyshire,
this morning's delivery has been sieved and cleaned
to remove any odd additions.
Thankfully, no iguanas today!
The average coffee bean weighs less than a fifth of a gram,
so they're easily blown around the factory using compressed air.
Our beans have made their way to the roasting area,
where Robbie's waiting for me under 15 metre high silos.
They are ginormous, absolutely ginormous!
How much does each silo weigh?
27 tonnes.
And how many silos? Eight.
That's over 200 tonnes of beans.
That's right, about 216 tonnes.
In normal production, how long would that last you?
Two to three days. You're kidding me!
No, no. We roast a lot of coffee.
How many jars of coffee are we going to make today?
175,000 jars.
That's enough to supply all of Manchester for a month.
So, what we're doing now,
we're going to weigh out a batch of 420 kilos.
So, what do we do, just open one of those hoppers
and drag down some beans?
No, we'll take from five different silos, cos it's a five-bean blend.
And each silo has got a different bean in it?
It's got a different grade of bean.
Every bean that enters the factory is given a grade
according to quality.
Our instant coffee needs five different beans.
They fall from the silos into this giant hopper,
which weighs out 420 kilos.
Shall we have a cup of tea before we go,
or do we get sacked if we have a cup of tea?
The beans are blown 11 metres up to the top of the room
to be prepared for roasting.
If heated too quickly,
compounds in the beans will burn and ruin the flavour,
so they're pre-warmed to 60 degrees C.
After ten minutes, they drop down a floor into the roaster.
They're moving around, it's like a washing machine!
That reminds me of when I used to go to the launderette when I was a kid
with my mum. They won't come out very clean in here.
We've got a stream of air coming in at the bottom of the roaster.
Because of the shape of the roaster,
the beans move up in the air stream and then drop back to the bottom
and keep rotating. Why do you need to move them around?
It gives us a more uniform colour, more even roast.
Our coffee will be a medium roast.
It's popular with consumers and works with or without milk.
How hot is it in there? We finish the temperature at 230 degrees.
It gets hotter as it goes? It progressively gets hotter, yeah.
And how long are they in there for?
Ten minutes. I can feel that extraordinary heat from here.
Yes. Wonderful!
Right, they are now brown,
they've gone from that grey colour to something I would recognise
as a coffee bean, that's brown.
That's a roast coffee, yeah.
What happens to them after ten minutes?
We drop them into the cooler.
Because they come out of here red hot, right?
Red hot. Let's go and have a look, shall we? OK.
The beans drop out of the roaster and down another floor
using only the force of gravity.
It's another washing machine!
This is the cooler. So, it comes down into that at 230 degrees...
Yeah. ..and that's moving around because of air,
the same as the one above. Exactly the same.
And what temperature do you want to get it down to? 40 degrees.
Why do you have to cool it?
If we was to discharge it when it was still hot,
you've got the chance of exothermic reaction in the silos.
What?! Exothermic reaction is where the self-heating of the beans,
they keep on roasting.
Ah... In the end, you could end up with a fire if they get too hot.
Ah! When you take something out of the oven,
people don't realise it's still going to cook.
It still keeps cooking. Residual heat.
Yeah. And now what's going to happen to 'em
when they get to the right temperature? They go to grinding.
Right, that's what I want to see.
Thank you so, so much. You're very welcome.
That was great - I know you're busy, so thank you.
Thank you.
I'm following the beans to the grinding department
just next door...
..where I'm meeting process specialist Katie Perry.
Katie, I'm Gregg.
What are you now doing with the roasted beans?
So, the roasted beans are fed into this grinder,
and within the grinder we have layers of rollers,
so as we move down the grinder, the rollers are getting closer together,
to grind the bean into a finer and finer particle.
So, these are the roast beans.
Now, that, finally, looks like a coffee bean.
Phwoar!
That'll wake you up in the morning.
So, this is a sample of partway through our grinder.
The smell is getting stronger, but that, yeah,
that is becoming a coarse dust, a dust with crispy bits in.
Yeah. And then our final sample...
This shows you our final grind,
so this is the fine particles of the coffee beans.
And how long does it take?
This grinder will take about 1,500 kilos of beans every hour.
Crying out loud! Can I watch the next stage, please?
Yes, follow me.
Roasted and ground,
we're well on the way to putting coffee in somebody's cup.
For many of us, coffee is a daily habit,
and the modern world is unimaginable without it.
Over to Ruth.
Cheers.
Today, our high streets are bustling with coffee shops,
and they're transforming the way we work -
providing desk space and Wi-Fi
for many of Britain's 2 million freelancers.
But it's not the first time
that coffee has been at the heart of major social change.
To find out where it all began,
I'm heading into the heart of the City of London
to meet historian Dr Matt Green.
Hi, Matt. Hi, Ruth.
How are you? I'm good.
Tell me, when did coffee arrive in this country?
It arrived in this very churchyard in the year 1652.
As early as that? And there was this sort of amazing looking sort of shed
that was decorated in garish Islamic patterning,
and that was the first coffee house in the whole country.
By 1700, there were 3,000 all over the city.
That is really fast, isn't it?
There was a coffee house on every street corner.
It became part of the fabric of urban living.
Although that first coffee to hit our shores
wasn't quite the drink we know today.
So, here we have some authentic
late-17th, early 18th-century coffee for your delectation.
OK. Would you like to try some?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go on, then.
Here we go. It might be a bit of a shock.
Oh, it's tough! That is a strong brew.
It is. It's... Bitter.
Industrial strength.
Really packs a punch.
Mmm. Think of this like fuel, the jet fuel of the Enlightenment.
Before the arrival of coffee, we had been a nation of beer drinkers.
Replacing alcohol with caffeine had many advantages,
including clearer heads.
Coffee houses became centres of discussion and debate,
often referred to as penny universities.
Anyone could go in for the price of a penny.
OK. So, you'd walk in, you'd hear the boiling of the coffee cauldron.
Through the haze, you'd see rows of moderately well-dressed men,
sitting around long, wooden tables.
The minute they saw you, they would stop what they were doing,
point in your general direction, and scream out the words,
"What news have you?"
You weren't really allowed to take your place
until you'd divulged some nuggets of news, or gossip or rumour.
But this was more than idle chatter.
These were places of business,
and different coffee houses attracted different clientele.
So, here we are in Exchange Alley,
and there were three very famous coffee houses here
in the 17th and 18th century.
The first one was Jonathan's, which is behind us.
This is where you'd come to trade stocks and shares.
OK. This gave rise to the London Stock Exchange.
Down there, a mere stone's throw away,
you have the site of Lloyds of London.
That's where ship captains and merchants and moneyed men
and insurers would coalesce into Britain's insurance industry.
And you needed a domestic market
for these goods that were being imported from all over the world,
so down here, we have a coffee house called Garraway's,
which was one of the most splendid and most famous coffeehouses.
And this was the eBay of its day, if you like,
where people would have auctions by candlelight.
So, they were just, one, two, three.
One, two, three -
but it was a triptych of coffee houses
which gave birth to modern capitalism.
Coffeehouses were also instrumental in the arrival
of the modern newspaper.
This coffee shop in Covent Garden
is on the site of Button's Coffee House,
established in 1712 by the playwright Joseph Addison
as a home for literary debate.
From here he wrote a newspaper called the Guardian,
which sourced its stories through anonymous notes
posted in the mouth of a golden lion,
which hung on the western wall.
To coffeehouses, changing the world since 1652.
Just think of that, next time you have a sip of your latte.
In the two hours and 38 minutes since our beans arrived...
..my coffee's been ground and sent to a high-security area
of the factory.
Where are we? What is this?
So, here, Greg, we're in our extraction area -
but this is our top-secret area,
so we can't actually show you any of the technology that we have
just behind the camera - but we'll be able to explain it to you.
As soon as coffee beans are ground,
they release that strong coffee aroma we all know and love.
To make sure it doesn't disappear into thin air,
it's collected using a clever, scientific process.
Nitrogen gas is pumped through the ground coffee,
capturing the aroma as it passes through.
The vapour is stored in a tank for later...
..while the ground coffee gets brewed up
in a super-sized cafetiere, called a pod.
You might put a couple of scoops into your cafetiere,
but what we're doing is we're putting nearly 700 kilos
into one of our pods.
I reckon, out of this, we could get five cups.
Yeah. How many do get out of your enormous one?
So, each extraction pod that we have would give us
250,000 cups of coffee.
Crying out loud! Where we going to get the biscuits for that?
SHE LAUGHS
If I make a cafetiere, I'm left with bits.
Yes. Now, some people throw them in the bin,
other people throw them in the garden.
What do you do with tonnes and tonnes of coffee bits?
So, all those coffee bits that are left over
are called our spent coffee grounds.
We keep them, squeeze all the water out of them
and then burn them in our boilers to power the factory.
Those coffee grounds produce the same amount of energy as coal.
So, if I stored up all my leftover coffee,
I could put it in my log burner.
Absolutely. Would it really work?
Yeah! You have extracted the aroma.
Yeah.
I know what you do with the bits that are left over,
what do you now do with the liquid?
So, this liquid would go to our evaporation process.
Brilliant. Show me.
So far, we've made coffee as I would at home,
but this is where things change.
Next, this liquid has to be transformed into dry granules.
Right. Where have you poured the enormous pot of coffee?
So, all that coffee extract is now in our evaporator.
An evaporator!
Yes.
That looks like it's going to the floor above.
How high is that? So, this evaporator actually goes up
all six floors of the building that we're in now.
Get out of here!
Really?
No way!
The whole building?
The whole building!
How much coffee is above me?
So, at the moment,
you have about 1 million cups of coffee above you.
If one of those bursts, you and I would melt like sugar cubes.
Every hour, 30,000 litres of coffee travels through heated pipes
inside the tower.
Warmed to 70 degrees C, the water evaporates and is siphoned off.
So, you are reducing your coffee in the same way
that I would reduce a stock at home.
Absolutely. I'd have it in a pot, and the more I heated it,
you would reduce the amount of liquid
but you would concentrate the flavour. Yes.
That's a stock or a sauce.
That's what you're doing with the coffee. Am I right?
Absolutely.
The liquid is reduced by 50%, creating a thick coffee extract.
And how long does it take coffee to go through the tubes?
So, from coffee entering our evaporator,
it will come out as a concentrated extract in about 45 minutes.
If you didn't concentrate it, would that mean, at home,
I would need loads and loads of spoonfuls of coffee?
Would I end up bringing home a jar as big as me?
Well, not quite! If we didn't remove the water from it,
then we wouldn't be able to freeze dry it.
Oh, OK. I just thought it would be much weaker.
HE LAUGHS
Eight hours and 23 minutes in, and we have a 25-metre high tower,
full of hot, highly-concentrated coffee.
Now, that would give you a kick.
The average cup of instant coffee contains 100mg of caffeine,
helping us to get up and get out of the house in the morning.
My mate, Cherry, has been having a go at giving it up.
I love my morning coffee, but for the next five days,
I've agreed to go cold turkey, as part of a scientific experiment.
Before I give up,
I want to understand what caffeine does to my body and brain,
so I'm heading to the University of Bristol
to meet Professor Peter Rogers... and a pineapple.
Peter! Are we having a '70s drinks party?
No, no. This is to show you how caffeine works on your brain.
Caffeine is a psychoactive drug in coffee, tea, cola...
Caffeine is a drug?!
Yes, well, it has psychostimulant effects.
So, this is my brain.
Well, no, actually, this represents a cell in your brain,
and these are receptors.
They're called adenosine receptors.
OK. A molecule, called adenosine, attaches itself to those cells.
Adenosine makes us feel sleepy.
And what caffeine can do is attach itself to the adenosine receptor.
It fits on the receptor like this.
So, what happens then, when adenosine comes along?
It can't attach itself to the ones that are occupied by caffeine.
Oh, I see! So, they take up the seats.
Yes. Which means you're less tired?
It does. But, the alertness created by caffeine isn't permanent.
The body is, in a sense, very clever.
When it's exposed regularly to caffeine, it adapts,
so the receptors become more sensitive,
or there are more of them.
What the body is trying to do is function normally.
Ohhh. Despite caffeine being around.
The more you have, the more you need.
Yes, that's a typical thing that happens with drugs.
You become tolerant.
The other effect is, if you now stop taking the drug,
you're going to feel pretty bad.
What you get is what's called a drug opposite effect.
So, in other words, rather than being more alert,
you're now actually sleepy and fatigued and tired.
So, that's a big downside.
With Peter's warnings ringing in my ears,
I nervously embark on the experiment.
It's Day 1 - I'm allowed caffeine today.
I am savouring every last drop.
So, it's Day 2.
It's a non-caffeine day.
I've got a nice cup of mint tea.
Look at that, hey!
I'm monitoring my blood pressure, tracking my activity,
and recording my mood.
Day 3, I feel rubbish today.
I really can't be bothered with anything.
SHE SIGHS
After five days,
I've re-caffeinated and I'm ready to face my test results.
OK. Woohoo!
So, Cherry, how did you find it?
Not good. Really?
Really, really bad.
OK. Well, that's caffeine cold turkey for you.
Some people even describe it like having flu-like symptoms.
What I want to know is,
do the numbers reflect the drama of the week?
So, these first results are from the alertness ratings you made.
On the Monday, you're less than 40... Yes. in terms of alertness.
When you're withdrawn from caffeine
on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, you're even less alert.
I'm knackered.
Want to get back into bed.
Normally, really full of beans, literally.
It can't be the caffeine...
Without caffeine, more adenosine jumped onto my receptors,
reducing my alertness.
Now, headache is another symptom of caffeine withdrawal.
Thursday, boom.
There it was. Right, right in the middle.
And now I've got the headache, the caffeine headache.
I've taken a couple of painkillers.
It doesn't work.
So, what caffeine normally does
is restrict blood-flow to the brain -
but then when you withdraw caffeine,
you get an increase, above normal, of blood flow to the brain,
and, actually, oddly enough, that's what gives you the headache.
But it's not all bad news.
Results show I slept earlier and for longer on non-caffeine days.
I'm so sleepy.
It's half-past eight!
So, if I don't want to give up my caffeine,
but I do want to be able to sleep easier, what do I do?
For the average person, it takes three to four hours
to eliminate half the amount of caffeine you've consumed
from your body.
So, if I have a cup of tea or coffee at about six o'clock in the evening,
will that affect my sleep?
Yes, it may well do.
It's all left me questioning my long-standing relationship
with caffeine.
Am I not better just kicking the habit completely?
Well, you could do that, or you could keep it in reserve.
So, rather than using it as I do now,
which is just to get through the day,
using it as a back-up for when I really, really need that extra kick?
Yes, and there's also some potentially good news.
There is evidence of a link between a lower risk of Parkinson's disease,
type 2 diabetes, dementia,
even depression amongst people who drink more coffee.
These health benefits have not yet been proven,
and you shouldn't change your coffee habits on this basis -
but I'll certainly be more canny about how I consume caffeine
in the future.
At the factory, our hot, concentrated coffee
is being pumped to the Freezing Department...
..where the liquid will become solid coffee granules.
In charge is Mike Dale.
Mike. Greg - pleased to meet you.
I've watched the most extraordinary process.
I've seen coffee beans come in green.
OK? I've seen them roasted, cooled down, ground,
then put, basically, in an enormous cafetiere,
and then reduced in the tubes that go over six floors.
Yep. Now what?! So, this is pre-chill.
This is where we pre-chill our coffee,
before it goes into the Cold Room,
and these heat exchanges here
are the same as you would find in an ice cream factory.
So, we are really generating coffee ice cream.
I love coffee ice cream.
Am I able to taste that?
Of course, if you wish.
Have you got any hundreds and thousands?
Not yet! HE LAUGHS
At minus six degrees C, it's more like syrup than ice cream.
Should I dip my...? I should dip.
Yeugh!
Whoa - you said ice cream!
That is like the most concentrated espresso coffee
you've ever had in your life!
That is just strong and bitter.
Yes. You're a nice fellow,
but I'm going to find it hard to trust you from now on.
HE LAUGHS
The coffee's now the correct texture to head into the freezer.
What temperature is the freezer?
The freezer's between -40 and -50 degrees.
Are people allowed in there? Oh, yes.
Can I go in there? We can,
but we need to dress for the occasion.
MUSIC: Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss
This doesn't feel anywhere near cold enough.
This isn't -40!
Nope, absolutely, Greg.
This is actually our pre-cool room.
So, what we have is the freezing belt here,
and that is what we freeze the coffee on.
The syrupy coffee is poured on to this conveyor belt
and disappears into the freezer.
WE are going to follow it in...
What we need to do is cover our face,
and I would recommend removing your glasses. Will they freeze?
They will freeze in there, yes.
HE LAUGHS Right, OK!
It's like part adventurous, and part very scary.
Are you ready?
Whoa!
This is the coldest place I've ever been.
The temperature is lower than at the North Pole,
and the noise is deafening.
As the liquid coffee travels along the conveyor belt,
it's blasted with chilly air from above and below.
It takes just two minutes to solidify,
turning it into a solid 8 millimetre thick sheet of frozen coffee.
This feeds into a chipper, which smashes it into icy granules,
each just 2 to 3 millimetres in size.
Whoa!
That is frightening!
That is painful.
That's not like anything on earth.
And this is the result.
You have frozen coffee.
That's off the belt.
That's just before it goes into the breaker
and then into the chipper and grinder.
This is even starting to thaw out outside here.
It's starting to get bendy.
Yep. You'll soon end up with toffee
and then you'll end up with liquor again. You know what?
I think of myself as possibly a bit silly,
because you hear the term freeze-dried,
but you don't ever really consider what that means.
And at the moment, we're only freezing, we're not drying yet.
That's the next step.
In the last eight hours and 37 minutes,
green beans have been transformed into frozen granules.
Despite all these mind-blowing processes,
instant coffee is a convenient and quick way
of getting a brew in your mug -
but when and why was it invented?
Traditionally, making a cup of coffee takes time -
and if you have the time, well, that's all good.
But historically, there have been places
where it wasn't safe to brew up.
On the fields of the American Civil War in the 1860s,
soldiers needed a quicker, more convenient, caffeine hit.
So, the Union Army tested a new coffee essence,
which was beans roasted and ground,
mixed with milk and sugar and the whole lot condensed down
into something that...
..well, looks rather like axle grease.
We followed the original recipe, so I can try it.
Soldiers would just add boiling water and gave it a stir...
..to make a sort of instant coffee.
Eurgh!
And it wasn't just Americans who relied on coffee.
It was also a popular choice for us tea-drinking Brits.
Our version of instant coffee was a liquid called Camp,
invented in 1876 and packed off in kit bags in the First World War.
Historian Taff Gillingham wanted to show me
the authentic trench coffee experience.
Hi, Taff. Hi.
Take me through the gates of hell!
Come on! Follow me.
So, here we are.
Do you want to try some? Yeah, all right.
SHE LAUGHS
It's not actually that bad.
You reckon? Yeah. OK.
Let's see...
Or, at least, not if you were living in conditions like this.
Urgh!
Oh, God. That's foul!
Sorry, that was a bit of a shock, how nasty that was!
THEY LAUGH
It's not really coffee at all, that's the trick.
It's got a tiny percentage of coffee in.
It's mostly chicory with sugar, mixed up into a sort of cordial,
which you then added hot water to,
to make some sort of instant, hot, vaguely coffee-tasting drink.
And I suppose it's fairly practical, isn't it?
I mean, it's just a small glass bottle that seals up.
A small bottle like that can be put in one of the fella's packs.
And they drank a lot of it.
I mean, this bottle was actually dug up on the Somme battlefield.
As you'd expect, as soon as they'd finished drinking it,
the fellas just threw them away,
and an enormous quantity of these still just turn up,
still laying in the mud where they've been for a century.
But things were about to change.
When the Americans joined the Great War in 1917,
they brought with them George Washington instant coffee -
named after its recent inventor, rather than the first president.
So, here we have George Washington brand,
and this is a very, very different thing to the liquid coffee
that we've tried earlier. OK.
So, for a start, it's proper coffee with proper caffeine in it.
That's going to make a difference, hopefully!
So, it was made by basically making coffee
and then evaporating the water off and tinning the powder.
Oh, let's try this then.
See if it tastes any better.
Let's try some.
Yeah. You'd know it was coffee.
It's not great coffee, but you'd know it was coffee.
And you'd... If there's a bit of a caffeine lift, as well,
I'm sure that was helpful.
Oh, absolutely. And what do the American soldiers think of it?
Well, it was very, very popular.
In fact, here's a letter from an American soldier.
"I'm very happy, despite the rats, the mud, the draughts,
"the roar of the cannon and the scream of the shells.
"It takes only a moment to light my little oil heater
"and make some George Washington coffee.
"Every night I offer up a special petition to the health
"and wellbeing of Mr Washington."
It became so popular that they even nicknamed it,
they'd call it a cup of George.
A cup of George! A cup of George.
Cup of George!
By the time the Second World War came round,
American brands like Nescafe and Maxwell House
had refined instant coffee manufacturing techniques.
Sachets of this new, improved coffee powder
were put in all the ration packs of the GI Joes
and became so synonymous with American soldiers
that the name changed from a cup of George to a cup of Joe.
So, as well as thanking the Americans for supporting us
in two world wars, it seems that we also owe them gratitude
for the mass production of instant coffee.
In Derbyshire, we've now got coffee granules...
..but they're still frozen.
It's time to put the dry into this freeze-dried coffee.
The granules emerge from the freezer in shallow trays.
Each one holds 15 kilos, enough for 75 jars.
They head into an airlock and are fed into a gigantic vacuum chamber,
where all the air has been sucked out.
This extreme low-pressure environment
is the same as sending our coffee 60 miles into space.
Please explain to me why it needs to be at that pressure.
OK. The reason it's at that pressure,
we need to go from a solid,
which is the ice which we've formed in the Cold Room,
to a vapour.
Now, we need to do that so rapidly
that we don't go back to a water phase,
otherwise you'll end up with concentrated liquor again.
The dryer is heated up, which melts the ice within the granules...
..but in the vacuum, the ice turns immediately into a gas,
without going through a liquid phase.
It's a process called sublimation.
So, the water is coming out of our icy coffee...
That's correct. ..in vapour...
Yes. ..leaving behind the frozen, dried coffee bits?
At that point, it's no longer frozen, it's just a dry coffee bit.
And you've got three of these Jules Verne submarines operating at once.
That's correct.
Every day? Every day.
Every hour? Every hour.
Never stops? Never stops.
So that we can have a cup of coffee
made by pouring boiling water on it? Exactly.
Do you take sugar? No.
Do you dunk a biscuit? Oh, I like a biscuit.
It takes three hours for the coffee to travel through the dryer.
Right.
So, the coffee's dried.
So, what is happening to it right now?
We empty the trays.
It just rotates the tray round, gives it a knock.
All that coffee will fall down and that goes into a big bag below.
Now, that's the sort of technology I can understand.
Great!
I like the way the two hammers come over and hit the trays!
If I was going to be a machine in here, I'd be that one.
Come on, then.
Here it goes.
HAMMER THUDS Boing!
11 hours and 37 minutes ago, we had green beans.
Now, we've got freeze-dried instant coffee.
The granules fall down a chute into the room below.
Once the bag is full of coffee, it's transferred to the filling area...
..where Dawn Thompson is waiting for me.
Dawn, can I come up?
Come on up.
Right.
Now, Dawn, we are just about to put coffee into jars, aren't we?
We are. So, what we're going to do now, shortly...
Don't call me Shortly. SHE LAUGHS
We're going to release this bag of coffee.
OK, would you like to do this next step?
How much coffee is in this bag?
450 kilos.
Half a tonne. How many jars does that make?
Around 2,250 jars of coffee.
And so, all the technical stuff I've seen, all the space-age stuff,
I'm going to empty it now by pulling the string?
Yeah, the cord. Is that right?
Yes.
It's coming.
We've got granules, but they don't smell like the coffee I know.
That's because the aroma we stored earlier
still needs to be put back in.
This is the last part of the process,
where we actually put the in-jar aroma back in before filling.
In-jar aroma? In-jar aroma! Why'd you do that?
Just so that we get that powerful smell?
Yeah, so when you open that jar of coffee,
you get that nice coffee smell.
Do you just spray it on the top of the jars, or...?
It gets sprayed onto the coffee as it's going into the filling room.
The granules get a good blast of that familiar coffee aroma
on their way down.
So, can you take me and show me what happens to this now?
Of course. It'd be my pleasure. Go on, you go first.
Thank you, Dawn.
Coffee is grown in over 50 countries around the world,
and more than 125 million people rely on it for their livelihood...
..but the future of the coffee plant could be at risk.
Cherry's at Kew Gardens,
home to the world's largest botanical collection,
to meet Dr Aaron Davis.
He's just returned from a fact-finding mission
to one of the world's largest coffee-producing countries,
Ethiopia.
CHERRY: Hi, Aaron, lovely to meet you.
Really nice to meet you, Cherry. So, is this the coffee plant?
Yes, this is arabica coffee.
OK. It's arabica coffee that we love to drink.
What have you discovered about what's going on with the plant
at the moment?
What we wanted to understand is how climate change
is going to affect coffee across this century -
and it's not good news, I'm afraid.
In many cases, we've seen arabica dying in Ethiopia, through drought.
Completely? Completely.
And I'm talking about hundreds, even thousands, of hectares.
It's time to wake up and smell the coffee.
Rising temperatures and droughts are causing harvests to fail.
Aaron's expedition data is being mapped by his colleague Justin Moat,
in order to predict which coffee-growing areas are at risk.
Hi, Justin.
So, what does that map show us?
Yes, so this is basically a spatial model.
So, the green areas represent where good climate,
good conditions for coffee growth are,
and we can look at the present day,
but we can also project this towards the future,
so we can see immediately these areas gone.
Why does it keep moving?
Temperatures are increasing,
but also rainfall patterns are changing, as well.
So, the only places that coffee will enjoy
will be higher up, higher elevations.
This data is helping coffee farmers plan for the future.
Would you say that people are responding to this?
What we're actually seeing now is farmers going in at some altitudes
we've never seen before.
They've moved to the fields that are a bit higher up the hill,
and they've moved again and again.
Problem is, there's only so high you can go.
Eventually, yep, we'll go off the top
if we carry on with these temperature increases.
And actually coffee will be the last of our problems.
It certainly will be.
These hotter, drier conditions
will have an impact on coffee worldwide.
So, the search is on to find a more resilient species of the plant.
Aaron is delving into Kew's archives,
to see if solutions for the future
can be found in the records of the past.
This place is amazing!
What's in here? This is Kew's Herbarium,
home to around 7 million dried plant specimens.
How is looking through these old specimens going to help you
solve the future of coffee?
Within these specimens, there is lots of information,
and information which you cannot find anywhere else.
Let me give you an example. We have a coffee here from East Africa.
We know this is a dry area.
Collected almost exactly 100 years ago.
It says here the beans are harvested
from both wild and cultivated bushes... Yes.
..and fetch a high price on the European markets.
So, it was sold in Europe?
Yet we know almost nothing about this coffee.
If that coffee plant can cope with conditions
where there isn't a lot of water, and it tastes amazing...
Yes. Then, there's your answer.
That's the moon-shot, that's the dream.
We've actually managed to acquire a sample.
We have some roasted that we can go and try now.
That's very, very exciting.
Let's go and have a very exclusive cup of coffee.
Cheers. Cheers.
To coffee's future.
What is that funny taste?
You're right. It's a herby, sort of eucalyptusy...
I don't think this coffee is the ultimate solution,
but with 125 known species recorded in the archive,
Aaron remains hopeful.
So, what is the dream?
What would you absolutely love to discover?
What we would really love to discover
is a climatically-tolerant coffee
that tastes as good, or perhaps even better, than arabica.
Are you looking for magic beans?
We are. Good luck. Thank you.
GREGG: Back in the factory, we've prepared the coffee.
Now, we need to get the jars ready.
Wow! That is a big heap of glass jars.
Can you guess how many jars are on that pallet?
Er, 600.
1,694 jars are on that pallet.
I got the 600 bit right! You did, yeah.
I love this stuff. I'm an absolute sucker for this stuff.
I could watch this all day long. What is happening?
So, the four crampons come in,
sweep it lovingly onto the conveyor belt.
So, very much the same
as if I have to carry three pints back from the bar.
I've got two, I've got one in each hand.
If I have three, I've got them squeezed together.
That's what that's doing. You have to try carrying four in each
and see how far you can get. It must break some.
No, very rarely.
Because it's such light pressure, it carries the jars across.
300 jars a minute shuffle along the conveyor...
..and are gently encouraged into position.
Oh, they're all getting a bit bunched up here.
This is why it's called the combiner.
So, as they come off the bed, they bunch together.
You deliberately create this curve.
Yes. So that the batches of jars catch up with each other.
Yes.
Come on, jars. Come on.
Come on, little jars.
How are they moving into single file?
I can understand the jars on the inside lane,
but the ones on the outside, they look like they're actually
trying to push their way in the dinner queue, how does that happen?
They just can't wait to be filled.
However, the belt speeds are different to the ones on the corner,
so they'll basically push themselves into single file.
With different belt speeds? Yes.
Now in an orderly queue, the jars glide to the next machine.
Something's getting hold of them and twisting them,
making them straight. Yeah. Why?
Because, as we go into the orientator,
we don't want them twisted.
The what? The orientator.
What's an orientator?
The jars are coming into the machine,
they're not really in the correct format.
So they're back to front.
But you're going to fill them up with coffee
and stick a lid on them, right?
Why does it matter if they're not all exactly the same way round?
We have to make sure the label gets put on the right way on the jar.
It looks like the end of the line might be a cliff-hanger.
They're going over the edge.
It's like a big dipper.
I just imagine them, all the funfair, going,
"Ahhhhh!"
So, are we finally going to put coffee in them, Dawn?
Finally. Come on. Show me.
Brilliant factory.
FUNFAIR MUSIC PLAYS
CHILDREN ON RIDE SHOUT
12 hours and 42 minutes into the production process,
coffee meets jar.
It's a nice sight, isn't it, actually?
Lovely. Look at that.
This machine fills 280 jars a minute.
It'll take more than 11 hours to get through today's batch of 175,000.
The caps are on - but hang on, where's the gold seal?
As you can see, when we open this jar up,
it doesn't have the seal across the top you're used to seeing
when you open a jar properly. The seal is actually in here.
So, the seal is already in the lid.
That's correct, yes.
And that machine does what to the lid?
It actually seals the membrane to the top of the jar.
Through the lid? Through the lid.
The plates above the jars work like upside-down hotplates.
They heat the foil to 80 Celsius, hot enough to melt the glue,
releasing the foil down onto the glass
without melting the lid itself.
That's remarkable.
That's one of the most mysterious things I've ever seen in a factory.
I recognise that.
That is a beautiful roasting coffee smell.
It does seem strange you had to take the smell out
and put it back in again.
Clever.
Dawn, thank you.
Can I say, for all the amazing processes in this factory,
this has been the most fun.
Come here.
Thank you very much. My pleasure.
Now it's time for the final steps.
The labels are put on the jars and they're wrapped in groups of six.
A shipping label is blown on...
..and they're sent up a spiral conveyor for one last joyride.
Then robots begin an elaborate stacking routine.
They arrange the jars with some right angles to the others...
..and squeeze them together to form a layer,
making sure the gap's in a different place each time.
This strange pattern is mathematically calculated
to give the 1.4m high stack stability and strength,
and to reduce the chance of breakages.
Finally, they're wrapped in cellophane.
13 hours and 22 minutes ago, I saw green beans arriving at the factory.
They've been roasted, ground, concentrated, frozen,
and sent into space.
Now transformed into freeze-dried coffee granules,
they're ready to leave the factory.
Waving them off is Clive Whitebrook.
That's it. That's my coffee being loaded onto the truck, Clive.
It is, the final pallet.
There is 48, which is approximately 40,000 jars,
which is about 4.4 million servings.
On that lorry is four and a half million cups of coffee.
Yes. How many lorries leave here every day?
Approximately six.
Wow! Quite a phenomenal process, isn't it?
It is. For something so relatively simple.
Yep. And that's what we all take for granted.
Full to the brim. That's it.
And that's ready to go, right?
It is. It's been quite a journey, you know.
From bean to jar. It's been absolutely amazing.
From the factory, the jars head to supermarket shelves
in the UK, Europe, and almost every corner of the world,
including coffee-producing countries Peru and Ecuador.
I drink instant coffee,
and if you'd have asked me how it was made,
I think I would have come up with
roasting the beans and grinding them -
but never in my wildest dreams would I ever have imagined
sheets of coffee frozen to -50 degrees
while then being dried out in machines
that look like Victorian steam engines.
Hours, and hours of complicated scientific process,
so that you and I can make a cup of coffee in seconds.
Next time, we're in Manchester,
inside one of the largest toilet paper factories in the UK.
If King Kong used toilet paper, that would be the one he used.
Where five and a half million loo rolls
roll off the end of the production line every week.
There we are.
And Cherry has a cheeky encounter...
Oh! What is that?!
..with a futuristic loo.